Natural disasters, such as storms, hurricanes, tornadoes, and earthquakes cause damage to multiple structures, such as homes, business premises, schools, hospitals, and other buildings and structures. Sometimes, significant structural damage may occur, including partial or complete collapse, falling walls, roofs, or entire floors and buildings, or complete destruction of structures causing injuries and even death to humans occupying such structures.
For example, earthquakes frequently result in human injuries and fatalities due to partial or complete structural collapses, where occupants of the structure are injured or trapped by falling debris, including floor, wall, or roof fragments, falling furniture, or other debris or objects. Further, tornadoes, or hurricane-type storms cause structural damage via rotating or straight-line winds, which frequently partially or completely destroy structures, often leaving behind only the structures foundations.
Because natural disasters come with varying warning times, ranging from days in the case of hurricanes, hours in the case of severe storms, minutes in the case of tornadoes, and no warning at all in the case of earthquakes, the potential for human injuries or fatalities is compounded where relatively large groups or people gather in structures such as in hospitals, schools, day-care centers, universities, office buildings, nursing homes, or other similar locations. Unfortunately, such structures often lack adequate natural disaster shelters, or in some cases have large centrally-located shelters where a large number of people have to be quickly moved or evacuated to in the event of a natural disaster.
Some people have mobility difficulties or require a longer time to evacuate to a centrally-located shelter, such as nursing home residents, hospital patients, or school-age or kindergarten-age children, for example. As such, large centrally-located shelters are not always practical, and their usefulness decreases with decreased warning times for some natural disasters. Further, because some centrally-located shelters are below-ground, such below-ground shelters introduce their own set of drawbacks, including difficult access for limited-mobility persons (e.g., the elderly, wheel chair of hospital bed bound persons), danger of flooding and/or gas leaks, and the potential for people to become trapped inside the below-ground shelter by debris blocking the exits
To that end, it would be advantageous to provide an above-around stowable shelter system configured to be securely anchored to a support when in use and conveniently stowed when not in use so as to be rapidly and easily deployed when needed such that people can be sheltered in place without requiring movement of people to a central location. It is to such stowable shelter systems and to methods for using thereof that exemplary embodiments of the inventive concepts disclosed and claimed herein are directed.